The storm ended and I remembered that it is still Halloween, not that we have the electric power to do much about it.
The storm was no big deal, lasting about only two hours. But, with 100 mile per hour wind, plenty of trees and power lines were destroyed. We are not sure when we will have power but the power company says by the end of the weekend by the latest.
I’m writing this on my phone. Every few hours I get in a car and charge it. Generator or not, there are only so many appliances you can attach to it.
Stay safe. Stay mighty. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Look after each other.
The waiting is the hardest part. So, said Tom Petty. I’m trying to get my work done by about noon because Hurricane Zeta should be along a few hours later. That means I should shut down this main machine. And, close the lower storm shutters.
The all seeing dog didn’t like being out this morning. We are just starting to get the outer bands of Zeta. The winds are kicking up a little along with some rain. She does not like being in the rain. The wind felt weird. So, did the atmosphere. Still, we had a 45 minute walk.
I really wasn’t looking to make pictures, the light is ugly. I managed to let one find me, but I think it was trying to escape me. I’m not sure that I’ll do anything with it.
Skulls and abandoned houses. I made this picture a few years ago for a client. I haven’t punished it here. I can’t remember where I found the skull. I think, maybe the French Quarter. I know where I found the old house. Combined, it’s a Halloween picture. The daily picture. I’m not sure about this years masking. We had a plan, but nature undid it with this storm.
It’s just another 2020 thing.
We’ll just have to see how fast it moves through the city. In theory, it will arrive in the late afternoon and be gone by dinner time. It’s the downed power lines that I worry about. Oh well, there’s plenty of work I can do on the phone and laptops. We probably won’t have the internet until power is restored.
That’s the long way of explaining why there might not be a post tomorrow.
Stay safe. Stay mighty. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Look after each other and, puhleez vote.
Spooky. Scary. That’s the season. The season of the witch. It’s really scary around swampville today. Sometime early in the morning my phone went crazy with a 36 hour hurricane warning. You have no idea how it feels when you get any kind of notification like that. Your heart pounds. You are wide awake. Your brain is moving too fast. And, then they say that we may have to evacuate.
Hahahaha.
Evacuate to where? In the season of the other witch — CoVid-19 — where do we go? Anyway, this storm has moved slightly to the east, but we will get hit pretty hard. We have no idea about is strength. Yet. It has to pass over the gulf, which is still very hot with summer’s heat. That charges it.
I already know the answer to my next question. And, I don’t like it.
I have a 505 area code. New Orleans has a 504 area code. My code is from our sojourn to the high desert in New Mexico after Hurricane Katrina did its thing. How did I receive an alert that is relevant to the 504 area code?
That’s easy. The least invasive is Google. I use Google Maps and their direction service. Google knows where I am. So does Apple and Samsung. I don’t like it, but that’s on me. Telling them where I’m located makes life easier.
The alert didn’t come from any of them. It came from the feds, through NOAA. They track my movements too. I read a piece in the New York Times, by Kara Swisher, who has been doing heavy digital studies for twenty years. She said that the government knows where we are every moment of every day. Mostly, they just collect the data. Sometimes they use what they’ve collected. This was one of those times. At least it’s for good.
But, what if it’s not? People were fighting against leaving their contact information at restaurants in case someone got sick and they needed to do some contact tracing. Who cares, we already are known to the people that matter.
Ms. Swisher said the only way to beat what amounts to a huge invasion of privacy is to buy a “burner” phone and only use it to make calls. You should also use an alias. After a few calls, dump it and start again. If you buy a smartphone and use it to check your email, or go to social sites you are immediately known.
Some life, eh?
Halloween and the picture. I haven’t been photographing a lot of holiday stuff lately so this is a retread. But, I’ve always really liked this picture. I made it the Quarter. Originally, it was in glorious color. But, when I experimented with it, I found that I liked this version a whole lot better.
Normally, I would photograph the Krewe of Boo. That’s cancelled this year for obvious reasons. Assuming we don’t take to big of a hit from the storm, I may wander around the Quarter looking for new and even more scary pictures on Halloween. We’ll see.
Stay safe. Stay mighty. Wear your mask. Wash your hands. Keep your distance.
A little rain fell. The water cleared and cooled the air. It also left little droplets on the leaves that weren’t calling it quits for autumn. I generally have problems with rain drops. I cannot keep them sharp. I got lucky. That, or I picked the proper focal length for this kind of work.
It’s a good picture with which to start the work week. It’s simple and clean. We need that for the next eight days.
Before we worry about that, another hurricane is making its way into the gulf. It’s a little too far out to really tell, but the cone and spaghetti models have it passing right through New Orleans by Wednesday. We’ve been lucky this hurricane season. Hopefully, we’ll keep it that way but when does our luck run out?
Even though the election is just eight days away, there is lots to worry about. Unless there is a landslide, the election will likely be contested. Even if a landslide happens, the next two and a half months will be the most dangerous in our country’s history.
Now do you see why starting out with something peaceful is a good idea?
The picture. This should be an easy image to make. See it, focus on it, push the button. Of course, it isn’t that simple for me. I’m lucky if I can keep the water drops in focus. Assuming I can do at least that, the rest is easy.
After the last few radioactive pictures, I’ve decided to move closer to center. They were getting a little crazy. They weren’t looking like a photograph nor were they looking like art. We’ll just see how long that lasts.
Stay safe. Stay mighty. Wear your mask. Wash your hands. Keep your distance. VOTE.
Finally. A real autumn sky, one with low yellow light. Light that peeks through the clouds and paints everything in front of it orange. One that turns the dusk sky dark blue, bordering on black.
That’s what we saw on a late afternoon walk that turned into almost night. The all seeing dog was sleeping pretty late into the early evening. When she awoke she coming hauling butt into my office where she proceeded to do a little dance which said, “I need to go outside right now.”
I always wonder about that since we have a doggie door. The other dogs are fine with it. She’s fine with it if we aren’t home, but if we are, she turns special.
Out we went. We headed toward the river and eventually came to this place. Condoville. That’s where the sun broke through over a street.
Funny thing about this dog. When I get to a place where she thinks that I want to stop, she stops. That’s what she did here, right in the middle of the street. I was able to take my time, which wasn’t more than a few minutes. I knew what I had so we kept walking.
One more thing.
We walked with a nice cool, dry breeze.
Autumn in Southeastern Louisiana.
Seeing. Seeing, feeling and light. That’s the picture. Seeing is about the subject. Feeling is how it made you, the photographer, feel. And, how you make your viewers feel. Light. Without it there is no photograph.
Sometimes, it’s easy. The subject is obvious. The feelings are mutual, between you and me. And, the light… what can I say?
I’m not the biggest fan of sunsets. At a certain point they become cliche. This one has a subject and I’m willing to bet this is my first of the year.
I also say that if that beautiful golden, orange light is in front of you, turn around. See what it illuminates. That could be THE picture. In case you are wondering, yes I did.
Stay safe. Stay mighty.Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Look after each other.
Cold front coming. We had a weird — not this weird — sky this morning. Then came the thunder and lightening followed by rain. When we got up this morning the temperatures dropped by about 20 degrees. This won’t last, but it feels so good.
I am experimenting with free design templates. Since most of my work is moving, but I still want to keep all y’all I have to learn a new template. I found one that I like a lot. I think I’ll try to make it look more like a website than blog site with a static font page and posts just behind that. You’ll still get the same emails and reader posts.
This could put me in a good position. If I can never move you over to my website than I can just come back here with no interruptions. Or, something like that.
If you believe in such things as astrology this should be my power month being a full bodied Scorpio.
So far during my month my modem and router gave up the ghost. A day went by before I could get back up and running. And, that big storm and all that rain? The dogs refuse to go out in it. That means I have to get wet.
My month, indeed.
I can hardly wait until my birthday week. That ought to be a hoot.
What a morning. Even though the sky wasn’t quite this yellow, there were tinges of bright yellow and green. Tornado skies. Never a good thing.
I didn’t hear of any water spouts touching down so maybe we are good.
I made this photograph while the all seeing dog was sniffing around for, well you know.
She likes to go places that aren’t in our neighborhood, so we did that. Our slight return probably put us in a better place to photograph the light.
Normally I say something like see it, photograph it. Not this time. I had to figure out where to put that tree in the foreground. It took longer than you think.
Stay safe. Stay mighty. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Look after each other.
Yesterday is gone. And, good riddance. It started bad and it ended worse. You didn’t see me here because my Cox modem/router failed. They wanted $75 because I didn’t have customer care. Okay, okay. I have a good idea of what this gear costs.
But, when I said yes to having a technician visit, he or she couldn’t be scheduled for almost two weeks.
Uh, wait a minute.
Off I went to the store. The first modem didn’t do what it was supposed to do, so I traded it for another one. I had the COX gear for so long that I forgot that it is a combination modem and router.
Back to the store I went.
New router in hand, I thought, “ah ha, I’me done.”
You know the saying, “If you want to make God laugh tell Him your plans?” It turns out that also includes making modern digital things work properly.
I called a Cox online tech who was helping me through the installation. It turns out two techs didn’t know what they were doing. Sure, my main machine — this one — was working. Somewhat. Safari couldn’t load a lot of websites, including WordPress. However, I had no signal to our televisions or our phones.
Luckily, there was a shouting mach on celestial television. When that was done I watched the end of a bad football game. And, finally Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone.
I went to sleep early. Midnight. Normally that would mean I’d wake up around 5am. For some reason I slept until 9am.
During that long sleep I had a dream. In it I figured out how to make every work. Maybe.
It came to me that it had to be the router since nothing but the main machine was getting signal. I Googled around for Linksys and found their website. It turns out that they have an app for my phone. I downloaded that, followed step by step instructions and, ALL JOY.
I do have to adjust each machine’s settings but I expected that.
You know how I say that we should let our pictures marinate? Maybe we should do that with all seemingly complicated issues.
Just a thought.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, er, in front of the porch, who’s the best photographer of them all?
Not me, that’s for sure.
I resurrected this picture from the scrapheap of time. I liked it t the time, but I didn’t share it.
Now I am.
I was walking around The Bywater, which is a realtor’s name. It’s really just a section of the 9th Ward.
I stumbled on this scene. I couldn’t believe my luck… until there was almost nothing to show in the mirror’s reflection.
I did what I could and called it good.
You would have seen another picture today, but it got lost in digital space. Likely, you’ll see it tomorrow.
Stay safe. Stay mighty. Wash your hands. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Look after each other.
Maybe this photograph is a little too radioactive. In my defense I cannot predict how WordPress will compress my already compressed .jpeg. Many times I over compensate. Don’t we all? Now that a bit of my life is getting back to some kind of normal feeling workflow I have to be very careful not to move too fast.
I still believe that we can emerge from these pandemic days better than we were before the virus came roaring through the country. I know we can do better. Much, much better.
I make no bones about my political leanings. I hope for a change of leaders in two weeks. Whether you are a democrat or a republican, I’m pretty sure that you’d like a leader who believes and trusts in science instead of his gut, a gut filled with five pounds of McDonalds fried food. I have nothing against McDonald’s, but everything in its place.
I’m not sure why months slipped by, but I could have put the time between March and July to better use. I’d like to claim that I was getting used to working from home, but that would be a lie. I always work from home.
Finally, I got going.
I think that we accomplished a lot as summer rolled on and fall arrived. But…
What about y’all? How did you do during this virus months?
Flowers. The best thing about moving on from WordPress will be the way drop caps are programmed. As you type the first letter of the word you are writing drops to the back of the word. So, Flowers is lowersF. I have no idea why this happens.
Anyway.
Back to flowers. These are the same ones that I turned into the autumn photograph. I reworked one picture into something bright, bold and energetic. It didn’t take long. Between Snapseed and OnOne I think it took me a total of 20 minutes.
Stay safe. Stay mighty.Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Stay focused. Vote.
